Linguistics is the scientific study of language—we develop techniques to explore patterns that all human languages have in common and investigate the ways in which each is unique.

Swarthmore Linguistics professors teach courses on all three campuses (though the vast majority are at Swarthmore), and linguistics courses regularly include students from all three schools.

Because the very nature of modernlinguistic inquiry is to build arguments for particular analyses, the study of linguistics gives the student finely honed argumentation skills, which stand in good stead in careers in law, business, and any other profession where such skills are crucial.

As long as the activity of linguists was limited to comparing one language with another, this general utility cannot have been apparent to most of the general public, and indeed the study was so specialised that there was no real reason to suppose it of possible interest to a wider audience.

Languages constitute the concrete object that the linguist encounters on the earth's surface; 'the language' is the heading one can provide for whatever generalisations the linguist may be able to extract from all his observations across time and space.

With an area of study as large and complex as linguistics, it is essential that information be made comprehensible to laypersons, undergraduates, non-specialists, and students in related fields.

The Encyclopedia of Linguistics accomplishes this by providing an accessible overview of and introduction to the multiple facets of the study of language from ancient times to the twenty-first century.

Linguistic topic essays are general introductions to the major fields of inquiry as well as issues within those fields.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara stands at the forefront of several converging trends in the field of linguistics, thanks to a series of key decisions made when the department was founded just two decades ago.

UCSB Linguistics was created to realize a vision of linguistics as a field that would seek explanations for language through an understanding of how it is used by speakers as a fundamental human activity.

With its focus on analyzing patterns of linguisticstructure, identifying patterns of language use, and theorizing the connections between them, over the last two decades UCSB has developed ideas and methods that are critical for moving the field of linguistics into a new era.

Through the comparison of languagestructures, such 19th-century European linguists as Jakob Grimm, Rasmus Rask, Karl Brugmann, and Antoine Meillet, as well as the American William Dwight Whitney, did much to establish the existence of the Indo-European family of languages.

In contrast to theoretical schools of linguistics, workers in applied linguistics in the latter part of the 20th cent.

Linguistics is also very new because Western science didn't put all this together into a useful discipline until about 200 years ago, and didn't invent many other useful ways to study other aspects of human language until the present century.

Linguistics is a bit unusual as a discipline because human language is so ubiquitous that it permeates everything in our experience.

In the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts of the University of Michigan, the Linguistics Department is housed administratively in the Division of Humanities, though its studies range far beyond that.

The study of language in the Linguistics Program addresses a broad range of fundamental issues pertaining to what it is to be human while providing a foundation for understanding English and learning other languages.

Linguistics is the study of language both as a faculty of mind and as a social institution.

Linguistics at William and Mary is administered through the Roy R. Charles Center as an interdisciplinary program.

Two linguists at William and Mary, Jack Martin and Ann Reed, both of whom are associate professors of English, are picking up the trail of a language that has not been spoken for centuries.

www.wm.edu /linguistics (204 words)

Stanford Linguistics | Main | What is Linguistics?(Site not responding. Last check: )

Linguistics concerns itself with the fundamental questions of what language is and how it is related to the other human faculties.

In answering these questions, linguists consider language as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon and seek to determine what is unique in languages, what is universal, how language is acquired, and how it changes.

Linguistics is, therefore, one of the cognitive sciences; it provides a link between the humanities and the social sciences, as well as education and hearing and speech sciences.

www-linguistics.stanford.edu /main/about.shtml (107 words)

FIU Linguistics Program(Site not responding. Last check: )

Linguistics at Florida International University offers a master's and a certificate program with courses taught through the departments of English and ModernLanguages.

Miami's unique linguistic situation contributes to an academic environment in which the study of the nature of language becomes relevant on a daily basis.

The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and languageanalysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world.

LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects which develop tools for the field, e.g., a peer-reviewed database of language and language-family information, and recommendations of best practice for digitizing endangered languages data.

LINGUIST is a free resource, run by linguistics professors and graduate students, and supported entirely by your donations.

As one of the humanities, linguistics is concerned with the historical development of a particular language or language family.

As a social science, linguistics may be related to anthropology in describinglanguage as part of culture; or it may be related to physics in describingphonetics; it may even be considered a natural science, related to the physical science of acoustics and the biological sciences of anatomy and physiology.

The interdisciplinary aspects of linguistic study are reflected in the organization of the program which offers a core of generallinguistics courses and draws upon linguistically related courses in other departments.